Niko Alm first applied for the license three years ago after reading that headgear was allowed in official pictures only for confessional reasons.

Mr. Alm said the sieve was a requirement of his religion, pastafarianism.

Later a police spokesman explained that the license was issued because Mr. Alm’s face was fully visible in the photo.

“The photo was not approved on religious grounds. The only criterion for photos in driving license applications is that the whole face must be visible,” said Manfred Reinthaler, a police spokesman in Vienna.

It took three years for authorities to determine that Alm was psychologically fit to drive after insisting he wear the spaghetti strainer.

They were probably more used to seeing Jews in yarmulkes, Sikhs in headwraps and Muslims in hijabs—religious headgear worn in reverence to God or as a form of modesty. Alm’s unusual headgear was motivated by a central tenet of pastafarianism: parody.

The U.S.-based Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was formed in 2005 in Kansas. An atheist with a knack for satire (imagine that!) critiqued the state school board’s decision to include intelligent design in the curricula by insisting that other alternatives, such as a giant spaghetti deity, also be included in the lessons.

Since then, the flying spaghetti monster, FSM, has become somewhat of a mascot for non-believers and freethinkers, living by the pastafarian code to “not take ourselves too seriously” and “welcoming all into the loving embrace of His Noodly Appendage.”